In international law, the development of legal theories has always been a political weapon. The developments in recent months have further intensified the drama of the debates within the field of international law. A recent closed-door conference held in the United States offered a wealth of insights \u2013 some profound, others downright bizarre \u2013 into current schools of thought.<\/p>\n
While, particularly after 1989, the central divide for several decades was between the so-called Global South and Eurocentric international law, this contrast is now increasingly fading. Its historic founding moment was the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which until very recently was followed by the formation of a collective political movement. It eventually found its academically recognized label in the acronym TWAIL \u2013 Third World Approaches to International Law. This progressive-critical movement not only claimed a voice (manifested in its own journals: TWAIL Review<\/a>) but also demanded comprehensive changes to the legal architecture of international law. For, according to the critique, international law is shaped by the political-economic interests of the Atlantic world and capitalism, thereby reinforcing their injustices and epistemological blind spots. Critical feminist perspectives<\/a> joined this movement.<\/p>\n After TWAIL and SWAIL, Now AFAIL?<\/strong><\/p>\n It took a relatively long time for another critical variant to emerge alongside TWAIL. While TWAIL stood for the genuine voice of the so-called \u201cThird\u201d World, other states with their own concerns regarding international law policy gathered under the SWAIL label: Second World Approaches to International Law. In February 2025, a conference on this topic took place<\/a> at the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna, placing the role of emerging economies in international law at the center of discussion. From the organizers\u2019 perspective, Vienna provided the appropriate genius loci, as Central and Eastern Europe had experienced a double exclusion \u2013 both from the mainstream of Western international law and from non-Western approaches to international law. In its double negation, this was still primarily directed against the unwelcome hegemonic claims of the Global North.<\/p>\n But like any such development, it inevitably generates a counter-movement, as can currently be seen in a new, authoritarian-reactionary approach emerging from the United States. From an opposing perspective, it turns against the traditional structures of universal international law. Instead, in the spirit of an \u201cAmerica First\u201d doctrine, international law is also being reshaped according to power-political interests, and thus the acronym reads: America-First Alternatives to International Law (AFAIL).<\/p>\n No, It Kant<\/strong><\/p>\n It is highly doubtful that the conference recently held in the U.S. can be regarded as its founding moment. After all, it was an exclusive circle of participants in which the shared political agendas were negotiated and formulated. The public was explicitly unwelcome; recordings and even mobile devices were prohibited. No external citations were permitted from the mission statement or the conference invitation. The fact that the author of these lines \u2013 albeit unnoticed \u2013 was able to participate was due to a carelessly sent Zoom link containing the telling (or intentional?) typo: \u201cInternational Low. A Failure.\u201d This makes the premises assumed to be shared convictions behind the closed doors of Waindell College (NY) and their dubious outcome all the more intriguing. It is one of the bizarre footnotes that some of the participants seemed to deliberately pronounce it as \u201cVandal College\u201d in order to performatively account for the desire for destruction.<\/p>\n The keynote was delivered by an international legal scholar from Athena College (Western Mass.), which amounted to nothing less than a scathing critique with a supposedly overly liberal international legal order. Whether liberal international law, in the spirit of Immanuel Kant, could still offer guidance today was unsurprisingly answered in the negative \u2013 with a dubious pun: \u201cNo, it Kant.\u201d The West had allowed itself to be walked all over for too long; America alone now had the moral legitimacy to radically alter the former project in order to save it. It comes as no surprise that the concept of a stoppable loss of power from the novel \u201cThe Leopard<\/a>\u201d was invoked here: what once befell the Sicilian princely house could one day befall the current U.S. pseudo-aristocracy as well. The implicit motto of the new, openly hegemonic AFAIL international law \u2013 which is to be minted on a gold coin \u2013 is correspondingly defensive and modernizing: \u201cIf we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change\u201d (Tomasi di Lampedusa). Imperial interests, it is argued, are by no means harmful here, but rather the only viable way to bring power interests into practical harmony with legal claims.<\/p>\n This approach seemed neither particularly bold nor original, but presumably made for a useful starting point precisely because it defined a common ground from which AFAIL institutions like Trump\u2019s \u201cBoard of Peace<\/a>\u201d could be evaluated favorably. At Waindell College, in any case, security advisors and political scientists collaborated in an interdisciplinary manner with international law experts for a few days. In panels such as \u201cThe Dark Side of Peace Conferences,\u201d the costs of unnecessary diplomatic correspondence and expensive foreign policy were weighed against current military expenditures to make the latter seem less exorbitant. In \u201cAvoided Ceasefires,\u201d participants argued from a sustainability perspective for the \u201cutilization\u201d of existing surplus ammunition. Workshops by the \u201cArt of the Deal\u201d Academy (Detroit) served as part of the accompanying program to impart knowledge under the guidance of experienced used-car dealers and were offered at a discount to Trump Gold Card holders.<\/p>\n Carl Schmitt Redivivus<\/strong><\/p>\n The institutions of classical law of war (now to be called the \u201cNew International Law of Peace\u201d) were not only critically evaluated but also adapted to the needs of the 21st century. If the dichotomy between war and peace or combatants and non-combatants is unrealistic in the reality of hostilities anyway, why should military strategy even take it into account at all, a civilian employee of the University of Rummidge (UK), Department of Nonlegal and Lethal Defense, pointed out? The same applies to the protection of cultural property, where in the future one could preemptively demand that the opposing state surrender protected cultural property before launching \u201cpeace missions\u201d against it. This would make superfluous the hair-splitting legal debates over responsibility and compensation that typically take place after destruction and lead to no agreement. However, here too \u2013 as was already the case during the Napoleonic Wars \u2013 the logistical question would arise of how, for example, the Pyramids could be transported to Washington.<\/p>\n At present, the majority of U.S. participants \u2013 many of whom belonged to the so-called national security sector \u2013 seemed to view the global political situation as favorable for cultivating such ways of thinking; some took them to extremes. A suggestion from a participant: Couldn\u2019t ChatGPT also be used to create a contemporary adaptation of Carl Schmitt\u2019s \u201cGro\u00dfraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot f\u00fcr raumfremde M\u00e4chte<\/a>\u201d (Kiel lecture of April 1, 1939 [Link p.13]; 4th edition 1941) as an authoritative reference point? In contrast, even the more imaginative among the scientists present found the idea of resurrecting him from DNA traces too far-fetched. But why shouldn\u2019t what will happen to mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and velociraptors also become reality for the visionaries of an empire-led order?<\/p>\n Washington Is Not Athens \u2013 or Is It?<\/strong><\/p>\n But just as Carl Schmitt was forced to witness the apocalyptic downfall of his Nazi hegemony only a few years later, so too might the orange-haired \u201cCaesar in the White House\u201d meet the same fate, more realistic voices warned. They cited the timeless Melian Dialogue, in which Athens is reminded that one day it, too, might be compelled to invoke international law. Namely, if America were to find itself in the unexpected position of the weaker party in a new world order and were now, in turn, to defend itself against the alleged \u201cmight makes right.\u201d Thus, in the long, unfinished history of interventions and empires, even the currently martial and proud U.S. could end up on the uncomfortable side of geopolitics.<\/p>\n